B2B Field Marketing: a guide for beginners

What is B2B field marketing?

For most people, it is all about events.

But field marketing is much more than just events. I’d say that events are just one aspect of field marketing.

Let's face it, folks often confuse the role of field marketing. There is a lot of ambiguity and that is often due to the way various organizations define this role. Also, the name ‘field’ doesn’t really help its cause.

Somewhere, very similar to how ‘product’ marketing is confused with different companies having different scope of work for PMM right from who product marketing reports to.

Field marketing isn't just about building booths, organizing cocktails and passing out brochures. For me, B2B field marketing is integrated marketing for a region or segment. Field marketing is more specialized than general marketing, and it involves direct interactions with target people to build connections and brand recognition in a specific area

With this context, I thought of penning down my thoughts on field marketing where I’ll break down certain elements and how they work along with central marketing.

What is B2B field marketing??

B2B field marketing is promoting a product, service, or brand directly to consumers or businesses in a specific area or "field”. It is a revenue/growth/demand generation marketing in a sales territory to develop a marketing strategy aligned with regional sales priorities.

Another way to look at field marketing could be ‘last mile’ of marketing. This implies that a field marketer would act as the last mile in the marketing supply chain and take the marketing strategies / content ‘handed down’ from corporate / central marketing to their respective region or ‘field’.

A field marketing head is primarily tasked to lead overall marketing - brand awareness, demand generation, pipeline acceleration, and customer engagement for the region. You can call a field marketing leader as a mini-CMO of the region as well. Field marketers create and run local or regional marketing activities for a territory or line of products.

Example:

When developing a field marketing strategy, you need to understand the ins and outs of the regional sales strategy. For example, let’s say your sales team wants to sell to retail and classifieds companies. It wouldn’t make sense if your marketing strategy is focused on generating leads from the finance industry. So always discuss with regional sales directors on the marketing approach that would make sense. Many B2B companies have a named account go-to-market approach, marketing for this is primarily a field marketer’s responsibility.

What are some of the common responsibilities of a B2B Field Marketer?

The main responsibility of a field marketer is to be the main stakeholder of local sales teams and coordinate marketing efforts? for the region. Here’s a list of some responsibilities-

• Strategy: Own the budget, messaging, marketing strategy, channel mix, and campaign execution by working closely with the global marketing team and the local Sales, SDR, CS and Pre-Sales teams, to increase awareness, drive engagement, generate leads, and support conversion rates
• Integrated Marketing: Build and run marketing campaigns designed to create awareness, generate interest, capture demand, accelerate pipeline and retain existing installed base through an integrated go-to-market plan taking into consideration the regional differences where necessary.
• Segmentation: identifying subgroups and segments within the target audience and database in order to deliver more tailored messaging and campaigns
• Lead / pipeline management: Track status, progress and follow up leads with operations and sales / SDR teams making sure that no lead stays unattended or is wrongly disqualified.
• Events: Manage events – own as well as third party - right from pre-event till post event
• Digital: Work closely with the digital team to provide guidance to run campaigns suitable for the region.
• Content: Work closely with content and PR teams ensuring that required content is created for the region, distributed via right channels and amplified.
• Product Marketing: Collaborate with the product marketing team to make sure that regional nuances are factored into campaigns and sales teams have all the necessary material.
• Partner Marketing: Work closely with the partnerships/ alliances team to create joint marketing plans with partners.
• Customer engagement: Interface with customer success teams for customer advocacy ( win stories, PR, case studies, speakers etc.) and also aid their efforts in expansion ( churn reduction, renewals, cross-sell and up-sell).
• Industry relations & Evangelism: Be the face of the company wherever needed, right from external analysts, industry associations, thought leaders and influencers, and develop new ecosystem relationships as needed.

These are in general most of the responsibilities of a field marketer. They might vary from company to company based on the maturity, org structure, domain and other factors.

Who are the most important stakeholders for a B2B Field Marketer?

For a field marketer, sales is the primary and most important stakeholder. Sales and marketing alignment is critical for the success of a B2B organization. So enabling sales in their goals is the biggest thing on a field marketer plate. For e.g.,?

• is it brand awareness that they feel is missing?
• is it closure that they struggle with?
• do they need more help on certain set of accounts?
• do they need any content to assist in active opportunities?
• do they need to discover new accounts / leads in? any market?

and so on…

However, apart from sales, partnerships, SDR and customer success are the other key stakeholders

• Sales Development Representatives (SDR) -?Marketing can help SDRs tailor their outreach efforts, which can lead to more effective lead qualification and a higher conversion rate.?Marketing can help SDRs with content relevant for various leads they are pursuing and also use SDRs as a medium to distribute content, engage on social media, invite people for events and seek their inputs from discovery / qualification calls. Collaborating with SDRs on content creation can yield powerful results. SDRs are on the front lines and have firsthand insights into the pain points and objections voiced by potential customers. By utilizing their feedback, marketers can create more targeted and effective content that speaks directly to the prospects’ needs
• Partnerships - With the alliances teams, field marketing can plan co-marketing or joint GTM activities, host or sponsor events together, collaborate on content creation and distribution and so on. For channel partners, equipping them with the best assets so that they can effectively help in selling is another thing that field marketing can help with.
• Customer Success - With customer success, apart from advocacy, field marketers can help in expansion and retention, i.e. cross sell, up sell, adoption and retention. In this bucket, there is everything related to marketing to the customer (newsletters, product round up, expansion campaigns, user conferences etc) and marketing with the customer (reviews, case studies, testimonials, videos, win stories, content).

What are some of the key metrics that Field Marketing should track?

Different organizations have different metrics. But to me, pipeline and/or revenue should be the northstar metric. Pipeline should be a combination of marketing sourced as well as overall regional pipeline because marketing touches every function and every stage of the buying cycle. When looking at pipeline, slice and dice it by source, industry, country, segment, ARR value, people involved and any other company specific fields.

At a deeper level, field marketers need to look at leading metrics like leads/ funnel (HI MQLs, SQL, Opps), conversions, sales cycle, win/loss reasons, customer retention (NPS/NRR), brand search volumes, content consumption and so on. These help in deciding the overall strategy and also identify gaps.

An example: - say UAE is a mature market for me where I might need to ensure that lead count stay stable while we work more on the bottom of funnel metrics like conversion and ARR value. However, for a newer market like South Africa, we would focus on top level metrics initially like brand search volumes, MQLs and plan activities to support the improvement of these.

How do Field Marketers plan and allocate their budgets?

The best answer is - Depends ??

Based on maturity, priority, geo, audience, goals (overall as well as campaign level)

It's important for Field Marketers to continuously monitor and adjust their budget allocation based on the performance of various marketing initiatives, shifting market dynamics, and evolving business priorities. Flexibility and adaptability are key in optimizing budget allocation for maximum impact.

Before starting the budgeting, you need to evaluate your current performance and results. This will help determine where you need to invest more or less in your field marketing activities.?

Something very important to consider is to go beyond metrics and look at people at the initial stage: what are your field people feeling the need for? What do they bring you in terms of news that were not contemplated in the initial planning and why were they not contemplated??

Something else to consider is the competitive landscape and any new forces impacting your industry.

Determine goals - overall and for specific markets / segments. You can set goals that focus on: more sales, increasing leads, getting followers, increasing traffic, brand awareness and so on.

The activities/ channels and their spends will depend on this.

For example- in a mature market where I have a decent customer base, I would spend less on top of the funnel activities and go for account specific, niche events and activities meant to engage these accounts. However, for entering a new market, I’d spend more on generic search and display as well as trade shows. Spending on own brand keywords might not help as there wont be sufficient search volumes for the product.?

Tip: Keep buffer for experiments, unplanned overages, ad-hoc and last minute items as well

What skills are required for a Field Marketer?

Generalist marketer with exposure to various sub functions, idea of overall business, buying process and cycle, funnel metrics, market/regional nuances, way other GTM teams function, stakeholder management and communication

To break it further into quantifiable ones-

• Basic understanding of GTM functions
• Communication
• Stakeholder management (Internal, external)
• Project Management
• Creativity
• Street smartness
• Data analysis
• Networking
• Research
• Some degree of writing skills

Tip: Ability to say NO

How can a company tailor their messaging and content to resonate with different regional audiences?

• Tailoring messaging and content to resonate with different regional audiences requires a deep understanding of local cultures, preferences, and nuances
• Market nuances: to understand the cultural, demographic, and socio-economic characteristics, maturity, buzzwords/terminologies,? local trends, traditions, values, and preferences.
• Localization: Develop content that is relevant to the audience - language, tone, imagery, and references to align with local customs and traditions.
• Messaging: Tailor messaging to address the unique pain points, aspirations, and priorities of each regional audience. Highlight how the company's products or services can solve local challenges or enhance the lives of consumers in that particular region.
• Incorporate local success stories, brand names, people, organizations
• Localization of Visuals and Graphic and avoid any cultural sensitivities or taboos.
• Distribution: formats and channels that make sense

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